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nyykiReaders of my journal may remember a frustrated post a while ago where I tried to return something to Best Buy and found out that they could only issue store credit because the computer wouldn't let them do anything else. Not even the store manager could override the computer, which was not in my mind a good system to have for customer satisfaction.
Recently a friend of mine at school had a similar problem. Her father was sending her a substantial sum of money from Saudi Arabia where he is to her school credit card account. He failed to finish out the proper e-mail address, putting .ed instead of .edu. She called the credit card company, but was told by the customer service agent she spoke with and two levels of supervisors that the computer wouldn't let them do anything, and that the money would have to be refunded to her dad's account and he'd have to send it again for her to get it.
Aristotle wrote that a Bureaucracy is the opposite of a Monarchy, as instead of having one person in charge there is no one in charge. We've had to deal with bureaucrats and their rules for a very long time, but now we've started institutionalizing things by putting them into computers that control what can and can't be done, with no power for exceptions, and this is not good. No computer programmer or team of programmers is going to be able to predict 100% of all situations that might come up, and leaving no way to override the system starts to seem a lot like the fictional SkyNet system from the Terminator series. Just who is in charge here now? And what are the trends that we can expect from things like this in the future? MOre fundamentally, if we can't fit the response to a proper situation, can we really serve a customer? If we're constrained by manacles of code in our action, is this really freedom?
Recently a friend of mine at school had a similar problem. Her father was sending her a substantial sum of money from Saudi Arabia where he is to her school credit card account. He failed to finish out the proper e-mail address, putting .ed instead of .edu. She called the credit card company, but was told by the customer service agent she spoke with and two levels of supervisors that the computer wouldn't let them do anything, and that the money would have to be refunded to her dad's account and he'd have to send it again for her to get it.
Aristotle wrote that a Bureaucracy is the opposite of a Monarchy, as instead of having one person in charge there is no one in charge. We've had to deal with bureaucrats and their rules for a very long time, but now we've started institutionalizing things by putting them into computers that control what can and can't be done, with no power for exceptions, and this is not good. No computer programmer or team of programmers is going to be able to predict 100% of all situations that might come up, and leaving no way to override the system starts to seem a lot like the fictional SkyNet system from the Terminator series. Just who is in charge here now? And what are the trends that we can expect from things like this in the future? MOre fundamentally, if we can't fit the response to a proper situation, can we really serve a customer? If we're constrained by manacles of code in our action, is this really freedom?
